Known processes of imparting beneficial properties to plants, such as selective breeding, can be extremely costly, slow, limited in scope, and fraught with regulatory difficulties. Few commercial successes have eventuated from over two decades of large-scale investment into this technology.
Despite many decades of successful scientific research into the conventional breeding of highly-productive crops and into development of transgenic crops, relatively little research effort has been directed at development of plant traits via other means.
Thus, there is a great need in the art for the development of methods to improve plant traits that do not suffer from the drawbacks associated with the present technology.